News

Welcome New MCL Member – JiGyun Kim

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – JiGyun Kim! Here is an interview with JiGyun:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is JiGyun Kim, I am a rising junior undergraduate from Korea Aerospace University. I major in Electronics and Avionics. Although I am pretty new in Deep Learning, I am interested in it, and its wide application attracts me very much. I am also interested in semiconductor design, as I had some design experience about it, like making digital clock and Mips CPU with Verilog HDL and making video game and karaoke machine with De1-SoC board. Moreover, I want to do some study in autonomous vehicles, what is why I am constructing a autonomous RC car navigated by image processing in my Bachelor’s degree capstone design.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

The first thing I was impressed when I came to USC is its beautiful campus, and also various people diversity. I think summer internship is a great chance for me to have a different perspective to the world.

MCL in USC is a really large research group, full of professional people. I believe I can a lot here, thanks to Prof. Kuo’s and other lab colleagues’ kindness and help. Additionally, One of the exciting things about MCL is the weekly seminar, which is a great communication platform with people from variant backgrounds.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

I want to complete projects by Deep Learning in MCL. My current summer study proposal is on the real-time recognition on car license plate number using YOLO v3. I plan to study the structure of Neural Networks, and then implement YOLO v3 by TensorFlow.

By Wei Wang|July 9th, 2018|News|Comments Off on Welcome New MCL Member – JiGyun Kim|

Welcome New MCL Member – Min Zhang

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Min Zhang! Here is an interview with Min:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Min Zhang. I graduated from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in June, 2017, and I am currently a M.S. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at USC. About research interests, I would like to work on image and video processing. Researches both on theoretical and application field attract me very much, like architecture researches on CNNs, or application research related to unmanned driving. In my daily life, I like to do some sports, such as playing table tennis, badminton, and running. And I am very interested in finding delicious food in LA.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

The environment of USC is quite good, as there are many green trees and flowers surrounding us. I really enjoy walking on campus. People in USC are all very kind and enthusiastic which impressed me a lot in the past year. I know that image processing of USC is quite good before I come here and I have wanted to study in MCL for a long time. Fortunately, I can be a summer intern student in MCL and I meet many hardworking and passionate students in the lab. I hope I can do well and study more.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

I am now working with Prof. Kuo to study further into CNN’s architecture. I hope we can have a better explanation about it. Besides, I am also interested in researches about image and video processing.

By Wei Wang|July 1st, 2018|News|Comments Off on Welcome New MCL Member – Min Zhang|

Welcome New MCL Member – Yao Zhu

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Yao Zhu! Here is an interview with Yao:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Yao Zhu. I am currently pursuing my Master degree of Electrical Engineering in USC. I graduated from Central South University in Hunan, Changsha, China. In research area, I am an avid learner in computer vision, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In my spare time, I have wide range of hobbies including doing sports, music, cook, etc. My favorite sport is table tennis.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

USC is a beautiful and charming community with strong cohesion. It welcomes students from every country in the world to come to US and pursue their dreams. I am glad to be in Trojan family and I’ll do my contribution to this big family. In MCL I feel like in a big family as well. Labmates are kind and always willing to give a hand. What’s more, they are all extraordinary in their field and I can learn a lot from them.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

I am working with Jiali, Saksham, Pranav as a team on Face Synthesis. They are excellent teammates and I appreciate working together with them. In the futures, I hope I can successfully accomplish this task and open up new road of synthesis.

By Wei Wang|June 24th, 2018|News|Comments Off on Welcome New MCL Member – Yao Zhu|

Welcome New MCL Member – Angela Wang

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Angela Wang! Here is an interview with Angela:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Angela Wang, I am a rising junior undergraduate studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. I will be joining MCL as a summer intern. Some of my research interests include machine learning and robotics. Apart from academics, I enjoy some hobbies including hiking, backpacking, rock climbing, cooking, baking, and traveling.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

MCL is an impressive community of people filled with bright, motivated, and intelligent people. Everyone is friendly and pleasure to meet. Also, I appreciate the amount of guidance that Professor Kuo seems to give to every member. Furthermore, it is quite amazing to see the amount of women in this lab, as it is quite rare in the STEM field to have about a 50/50 ratio.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

For this summer, I will be working with Bin on a natural language processing project, specifically word embedding. Under the guidance of Professor Kuo and Bin, I am excited to learn a lot and work on an interesting project. And also, I hope to meet many others in the MCL community.

By Wei Wang|June 18th, 2018|News|Comments Off on Welcome New MCL Member – Angela Wang|

Welcome New MCL Member – Yingpeng Deng

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Yingpeng Deng! Here is an interview with Yingpeng:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

My name is Yingpeng Deng, a first-year master student in Electrical Engineering at USC. I’ve graduated from Tianjin University, China in 2017 and was enrolled in USC to pursue my master’s degree. I am fascinated in basketball, hiking, pop & rock music, video games, oh, and research (laugh). As a member of MCL in this summer, my research interests are image processing, object classification and machine learning.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

The first time I met USC, I was surprised by her beauty and elegance. There are so many trees and green lands for people to relax and rest. I like to have a walk within the campus in my spare time. What’s more, the various kinds of restaurants inside and outside the campus can always satisfy my stomach and cure all my bad moods. MCL first impressed my with its big number of members, as well as with a bunch of positive lab mates and a hard-working and enthusiastic professor. I felt really excited to learn from them.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

I am glad to be assigned to work on the topic of object classification with another outstanding lab mate, Wei. Now We are working on extract the discriminative regions in the object images before classification by Saak transform. I hope to achieve the best of Saak transform with our efforts in the future.

By Wei Wang|June 10th, 2018|News|Comments Off on Welcome New MCL Member – Yingpeng Deng|

Welcome New MCL Member – Saksham Suri

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Saksham Suri! Here is an interview with Saksham:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

Hi, I am Saksham Suri. I am a 3rd year undergraduate at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. I am pursuing my B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering. My research interests lie in the field of machine learning and deep learning. Some of my past projects included Adversarial Learning on Medical Images, Deep Reinforcement Learning on Atari Games and Transferring Intuitions to Improve Classifier Performance with Limited Labeled Data. Other than academics I really like swimming.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

It’s been around 2 weeks since I came to USC and even in this short span I have felt a welcoming and helpful attitude of the students here. Everyone is ready to assist. Due to this kind of an environment I am always comfortable and am able to interact with others. I am also quite amazed by the beauty of the campus and the architecture of the various buildings.

MCL has a tradition of weekly seminars which I think would be really helpful as every week we can learn something new and also interact with the other members. Besides, I have majorly interacted more with my project team. Everyone in the team is approachable and we treat each other like a family. We even went on an outing together which really helped in coming to know each other better.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

My project team consists of Jiali, Yao and Pranav and our main area of focus would be “High-Resolution Face Image Synthesis using MSG”. I am certain that through [...]

By Wei Wang|June 4th, 2018|News|Comments Off on Welcome New MCL Member – Saksham Suri|

Welcome New MCL Member – Pranav Kulkarni

We are happy to welcome a MCL summer intern – Pranav Kulkarni! Here is an interview with Pranav:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

I am Pranav Kulkarni, a 3rd-year undergraduate student from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India with major in Electrical Engineering and minor in Computer Science. I am joining MCL as a summer intern for 2 months as a part of IUSSTF Viterbi-India Program. My research interest lies in the area of Signal and Image Processing. The major projects I have worked on include ‘Touchless Fingerprint Recognition’ and ‘Generalization of Fractional Fourier Transform and its application in Radar Imaging’. Apart from my studies, I like to play chess.

2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

USC is an institute with its unique culture and people from diverse backgrounds. It has a wonderful campus and it’s going to be fun to explore it. The MCL is full of hardworking and enthusiastic masters and Ph.D. students. It is going to a great experience to get know them all and understand their perspectives.

3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

I will be working on the project of ‘High-Resolution Face Image Synthesis using MSG’ with Jiali, Yao and Saksham, who is another intern. To start with, we are working on digit synthesis. Working under the guidance of Prof. Kuo is going to be a great learning experience. The research culture here at MCL is definitely a thing I would like to imbibe in myself.

By Wei Wang|May 27th, 2018|News|Comments Off on Welcome New MCL Member – Pranav Kulkarni|

Professor Kuo Delivered Keynote at ICCE-TW 2018

The IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics – Taiwan, 2018 was held from May 19th to 21th at National Chung Hsing University. As a grand forum for scholars and professional persons all around the world, ICCE-Taiwan aims to initiate profound discussions on research and discovery in electronics and relevant professional field.

MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, gave the opening keynote at this conference. The title of his keynote speech is “RETHINKING CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS (CNNS)”. In this speech, Professor Kuo first explained the reasons behind the superior performance of CNNs. Then, he presented an alternative solution, which is motivated by CNNs yet allows rigorous and transparent mathematical treatment, based on a data-driven Saak (Subspace approximation with augmented kernels) transform. His speech was well received by the audience.

After the keynote, Professor Kuo also served as a panelist in the panel discussion with a theme on “Artificial Intelligence on Consumer Electronics for Smart Future”. Besides Professor Kuo, there were two other panelists – Dr. Michael J Chang and Professor Robert Chen-Hao Chang. Dr. Michael Chang is Director General of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Center in Taiwan while Professor Robert Chang is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at the National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. Professor Robert Chang is also a Program Director of Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design for AI Edge Project under the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan. They discussed the challenges faced by Taiwan IT industry in developing AI related business and products and answered questions from conference attendees.

Congratulations to Siyang for Completing Her PhD Study at USC/MCL

Siyang received her Bachelor of Engineering degree from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, in June 2014. After that, she started her Ph.D study at University of Southern California, with the Annenberg Fellowship and the WiSE Fellowship. She joined Media Communications Lab (MCL) and was supervised by Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo.

Her research interest was computer vision, with specialties in object detection and segmentation. During her Ph.D study, she collaborated with Google Research on multiple projects and had several corresponding publications. On April 26, she successfully defended her thesis titled “Object Localization with Deep Learning Techniques”.

Congratulations to Siyang and her families for completing her Ph.D study at USC!

By Wei Wang|May 13th, 2018|News|Comments Off on Congratulations to Siyang for Completing Her PhD Study at USC/MCL|

MCL Held the Semester-end Dinner

MCL held a semester-end dinner on Apr. 27 for the closure of Spring 2018. This is also a farewell party for MCL upcoming graduates, Siyang Li, Haiqiang Wang, and Eric Hsieh. The following is from the talk given by our graduates.

Saying: I would like to thank Prof. Kuo’s guidance during these years, and thank all support from MCL family. Studying in MCL and USC would be priceless memory in my life. My suggestion for young generations is that PhD program may be long, but starting doing research as early as possible is essentially important for the whole program. Also, balancing life and work is good for long-term productivity.

Haiqiang: I would like to thank all MCL members. Hope the junior students in MCL can keep our traditions of being friendly and helpful. We learning thinking methods and skills here, and we also learn to offer help here. This is one of the shining points of MCL family.

Eric: I really appreciate the chance here in MCL to work with different people on variant research topics, and I really enjoy participating in MCL routine work for MCL big family. Hope we can keep in touch in long term.

The semester-end dinner and farewell party will become a new MCL tradition. Wish all the best to our new graduates! Fight on!

By Wei Wang|May 7th, 2018|News|Comments Off on MCL Held the Semester-end Dinner|